Putting A Hard Drive In The Freezer For Data Recovery 

I just recovered a dying Seagate 1TB hard drive by this method. I had heard of people putting their old iphones in the freezer and getting them working again temporarily until they warmed up. I ran a check which was really slow but said the data was not corrupt. It would usually read very slowly, although on some regions seemed to get so slow it times out. But never had other kinds of failures. After trying some simple things that did not work, I tried putting it in the freezer for 40 minutes. I took it out, and plugged it in. It works like new for about 10 minutes, and then as the drive warms up, the performance drops until it is painfully slow. Then you stick it in the freezer again for another cycle. Yes, I was worried about condensation, and would wipe off the drive before returning it to the freezer for the next cycle. Since keeping it cold was critical for operation, I placed the harddrive on one of those cold gel packs. I also placed a frozen dinner on top of it, and even put a little plastic bag around the exposed sides to keep heat from getting to it. For a while I thought about putting it into a bag to protect it in the freezer, but that would have slowed down the rate at which the drive can cool. It took about 10 cycles, but I recovered all 670GB of data​ off of the drive! Nothing was lost in the end. Perhaps the freezing helps the circuit board on the harddrive.

Yesterday I Tried This On My 320Gb Western Digital ..Kept it the Freezer for Just 15 min...And LO ! YES ! It Came Back To Life , This Is Really Awesome ! Thanks A Million...Dude.

It's a worse idea to pay $600 or $1100 or more for data recovery companies. The best idea is to spend $80 on another drive and do regular backups.

After removing the hard drive from the freezer, you can thaw it in the microwave.

That's One Of The Craziest Things I've Heard. Your Explanation On Why Not To Do This Is Absolutely Correct!

I admit my brother and I tried this back on 1998, we did seal it like that, I knew it was useless, but we had to try it we were young and desperate. Thanks for the video.

Thank you, I was about to put a 750GB drive in the freezer as a last resort as it was spinning up but not being recognized even by the BIOS. As you demonstrated this would likely have completely killed my drive and made the data unrecoverable. Thanks again for debunking this myth.

Thanks a lot for repeating this experiment, I hadn't seen any other videos putting it through a real data test like this. Good to know.

Thanks for the info! One of my teachers suggested to freeze your HDD to recover information, but only as a last resort. I guess if you tried everything else... Still I wouldn't do this!!

From time to time, I've saved data from drives which were apparently completely dead by putting them in the fridge - it's a REAL bad idea though, if there's any chance of saving the drive in any other way. It's a LAST RESORT - but, occasionally, it does work...! Not always, but sometimes.

In all my years in IT I just saw one instance of such a thing working. Around 14 years ago a customer had a, really expensive, Fujitsu server with a RAID of 2 Barracuda scsi drives. It was the main server for the whole company, and all of sudden both drives started failing. They started up just fine and all that, but after 5 minutes or so both drives disappeared suddenly from the controller, as if they where disconnected from the controller or shut down. The problem was consistent, and only changed if you left the server case open, that made the drives work for like 15 minutes before shutting down, so it seemed to be something to do with temperature and the electronics of the drives. Removing the drives and connecting them with longer cables outside the case made them work for a longer period of time, but not enough to do any backup of the data. At the end we used a pair of very long scsi cables, put both drives inside a bucket with 3 bags of ice cubes to keep them really cold, and managed to backup everything from both drives in a couple of hours. Not long after finishing the backup, the drives just died and never worked again, most probably due to the damage you show in this video. It was a nasty kludge, and, in my opinion, we were extremely lucky, but the situation was really desperate at the time, as the customer didnt have backups of anything at all, and the whole company was halted without that data. In case you wonder, we didnt have access to any specialist in data recovery. Where I live, in a spanish touristic island, there was nothing remotely like your services at that time, and I think nowadays there isnt any yet.

Had an 11 year old Fujitsu 2.5" drive with errors all over it. Freezing worked again. Windows files were too badly gone even with Windows repair but got all of client's data. This time I dribbled freeze spray on the bearing casing during a force clone as it didn't respond as well to a full freeze. Looks like it was definitely bearing play in this instance. Remember: only try these techniques if you want to dabble with recovery when data is not critical. Take it straight to an expert if in doubt.

so the short answer is: Don't put it in the freezer, right?

i got data off a bad IDE 2,5 inch 80Gb Toshiba hard drive, the drive ball bairings got sticky so the drive wasn't happy when it spinned up, it couldn't achieve its 4200rpm and it was making awfull squeeky sounds, so i turned the drive upside down, and i took a hair dryer and set it to very hot, i blew the hot air with a home made tube on the center of the spindel motor and once it got hot enough, the drive actually was accessible! I could get the precious data of of it and i made a persons day :)

That gives new meaning to cold storage

If your goal here is to keep hard drives out of the freezer you may want to change the title of this video.

It's been over 3 years now and we are still waiting for someone to post a video of an actual failed hard drive being recovered using the freezer method. I don't mean a drive that just reads slow...I mean a clicking drive that is completely undetectable. If it works so well...show us. This video is not meant as a scare tactic or a way to boost our business...it's to show people why they shouldn't attempt this if they have irreplaceable data. In case you missed it, we have another freezer video using even better safety precautions. It ended up killing a perfectly functional drive. Link here ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wYY-Ixq_g-0.html

No problem. I believe we may take this damaged drive and do another video on hard drive repair where we attempt to fix it. I'm planning on taking some time either early in the morning or sometime this weekend when we aren't so busy to film it.

I used to do it years ago, when my hard drive gives a no read error I used to wrap it in plastic and freezing it overnight, I take it out of the freezer, wipe the frost off and then drop it at about 4-5 inches high (to jar everything loose), install it and then it works fine again. It works for about 4 to 8 months then it gives a no read error again so I put it in the freezer again and it'll work fine again. I probably did that about ten times then got tired doing it so replaced it with a new one.

The freezer trick has worked many times for me. NOTE: as ACS have mentioned in the video, it shouldn't be attempted if you have data that absolutely must be recovered. Just take it to a recovery company such as them immediately. The data I'm recovering for clients is simply not worth the large cost of professional recovery so I have nothing to lose. I have had drives that are undetectable, click of death, read error reports etc. Most have been recoverable by freezing. I had a WD blue drive last week that was really bad so I had a bag of ice on it while force cloning. Went from totally undetectable to a continuous but slow transfer. Recovered all data. The condensation on the platters does not seem to stop the heads from reading and even the pcb doesn't seem to mind frost and moisture but as I said, don't try it unless you have nothing to lose :) I have recovered around 12 drives of various types and brands by freezing. Ps, have tried using freeze spray on pcb with limited success. It seems that freezing the whole drive is best. I'm thinking bearing wear may be the culprit as concentrating the ice on the frame and bearing seems to give best results normally. Any thoughts??

Worked for me. For about 10 mins giving me enough time to get important info.

Is there really some people stupid enough to put their hard drives in the freezer? This is so stupid! The proper way for a complete recovery it's obviously to put your hard drive in some boiling water for about an hour...

You said that in most cases freezer method works if problem with electronics board. Is there any sense to separate this board and put in a freezer instead of a whole hard drive?

in 10 years as a tech, ive never had this work

Hi I know it is a long time since you did this but when you took the drive out of the bag was it still cold?. If so then moisture would freeze on the platters from the air as you open it. The reason I say this I had a drive from a apple cinema that would not boot and I could not get much if any data off it. I put it in a freezer inside bags but connected to a USB to SATA interface. 24H later I left it in the freezer and powered it up and got 92Gb off it and the user was over the moon. I don't know if it was the board or the mechanics that was faulty but it did work. But I have never been able to repeat it properly again.

Holy shit, I just need to post this to nonbelievers that this shit can work. Thanks all of internet for this incredible tip. I had a harddrive that wasn't even recognized by bios (would get stuck trying to figure the drive out). After freezing it for ~20-30 min i managed to get it working/spinning and now made backups of all my pictures (was despaired yesterday since some proffessional services wanted as much as 800-900$). Anyway thanks for spreading the word!

I didn't even realize it was until I just watched it again. Doesn't matter though, see the follow up video where we did this experiment again with a sealed bag and even used a desiccant inside the bag with the hard drive and had the exact same results:

People have recommended using a desiccant to absorb moisture when placing it in the freezer. If you've got another junk drive I'd be interested to see if that significantly cuts down on the ice formation.

That is most likely an issue with the heads (which freezing won't help), but it could also be firmware related in some instances.

Can you do this method for damaged PCB board to restart hard drive

Cool thanks. What about a drive that spins up, the heads move but it won't mount?

That is actually the only thing we would ever recommend, because as was mentioned in the video, typically if cold affects the performance of the drive in a positive manner, it's because the electronic components are weak/damaged. We have had drives that we've imaged where we had to keep constant cooling on the motor controller and other IC's. But again, a clicking drive with bad heads won't be repaired by freezing it, regardless of the method used.

We are in Texas...just north of Austin. We have a few Regional Affiliates and resellers around the nation, but everything gets shipped to our lab here in Texas.

i this did 15-20 minutes waited am i. however still disc boot failure. either keyboard running won't

Preserve the data kids. Preserve.

We just uploaded another video where we did this experiment again. Used a different type of drive, used a desiccant in the bag with the drive, left it in the freezer for over 18 hours, hooked it up right away, and it killed the heads almost immediately. Opened the drive up, and the platter was still covered with ice crystals.

We have plenty of drives, I just need to find the time to do it. I don't see it being a significant help, but I would be interested in seeing what, if any, affect it has.

what I'll do after opening hard disc....??? PLS need answer.....

I have a portable hdd which shows folders but no data probably coz I compressed and stuffed lot of data in it ? movies and songs mostly. I tried CMD copy or xcompy or some commands, but did not help. any help ? thanks

hi , I was not using my desktop hard disk from last 4 years, But now I wanna recover the data from that. But now my hard disk stops spinning, can freezer method solve my problem?

have you recovered any of the He drives? like the 8tb and up? Hitachi He or Seagate? I'm curious how to get the helium back inside the HDA once its been headswapped.

How did it work out for you?

I have to agree. freezing drives and recovery do not go together.

that idea originally came from when people thought that putting a car stereo in the freezer would stop it asking you for the key code haha

I think I'm with Marius, the frozen condensation may be room air moisture introduced upon opening the drive. I'd like to see if packing a drive in dessicant (like silica gel) and freezing it, then opening it in a very cold, dry room would show the same platter moisture. If not, then there may be a case for freezing a drive (seems like refrigerating would be enough, but I have no experience with this) in dessicant as a poor man's way to try to recover data. Or maybe, for strictly electronic troubles, just setting the drive on a plastic bag of ice water so the whole circuit board is in contact might help.

We've been considering doing another test anyway, just to see if there is any difference if we use a desiccant in the bad to reduce moisture content, and theoretically reduce or eliminate icing of the platters. So we may do what you suggested. I'm 99% sure the desiccant won't help. There's no doubt the frost on this drive would have killed the heads almost instantly. Any imperfections in the platters (including ice) will impact the heads and damage them, so this goes beyond just looking bad.

My Toshiba 500 GB hdd is not detectable. I have to recover document and setting folder from it. what should I do ?

thanks man!

in whats states are you guys locaded, i would like to know, i did the same as you guys my 500 gb hard drive with at least 7 years of music is gone......

How about putting the whole computer out in the cold, and then start it up in the cold? It looks like condensation is what causes the damage.

on the older WD drives what is that black thing that sits over the platters ? it seems to have the case cover hold it on?

Yes I read about Seagates having that firmware bug. The model I have is 7200.11 and apparently you can fix them by making a makeshift serial port and modifying some settings in the firmware but it seems rather tedious.

There is condensation because the drive was opened and the humidity in the air came in contact with the cold surface. No condensation takes place inside the drive as long as it is sealed.

thats a crappy freezer you have if its like that after 5 hours if was in my freezer it would be a block of ice lol

I have been able to save many drives by putting it in the freezer. Stuff that we thought would never see again. Managed to save about 97% of the data on one drive for a company. If you open a drive while it is frozen cold it WILL get condensation (pure natural physical reaction) The key is to put it in so it gets cold enough so the board works for a limited time, enough time to pull what ever you can off the drive!

What about spraying the board with that freezing stuff that is used to test bad capacitors?

Only IF the PCB is the actual problem...and on most drives...only if you have the equipment needed to reprogram some of the chips on the PCB that contain adaptive data. As far as replacing heads...it also depends on whether or not that is necessary, and it also depends on whether you are equipped and experienced enough to do it yourself. Proper diagnosis and experience are the biggest requirement when it comes to successfully recovering data.

I know this is an old video but i'm gonna say it anyway. In the kindest way you are doing the "wrong" thing the wrong way! See this is where a professional only knows the things they are taught. This is inside the box thinking. You take any cold glass out of a freezer and the INSTANT it touches the air you get the frost. You did that. Just like any professional procedure there's a procedure for this as well. I may video the correct way to do this and display the platters as well but under a controlled environment that anyone has access to. It is not hard to do the wrong thing the right way and be successful.

Why was the ziplock bag unzipped when he unwrapped from the bubble wrap?

I have a buffalo ministation, i dropped it and it makes a weird clicking noise. Any way i can recover the data? Or is there any software that can help me recover data? Any help will be appreciated.

It's the condensation that causes damage to the platter (but it will short out components), it's the ice that forms that causes the most damage. You only have about 0.3 microns of space between the heads and the platter surface. A human hair is about 85 microns in diameter, if that helps put it in perspective. So even the most minor amount of debris (whether it be dirt or ice), can and most likely will damage the platter. Beyond that, it's still a fact cold air won't fix broken parts.

I agree that condensation is going to happen but I find it hard to believe that a little condensation will effect magnetic reading or cause scratches. sure the condensation will get wiped away but unless there is debris in the condensation how will that effect the magnetic data?

In most cases when a hard drive is dropped, it will damage the heads. The clicking sound you hear is a result of the heads seeking back and forth trying to read the appropriate track so the drive can calibrate. I would avoid powering the drive on any more if the data is important. Being that it was dropped the heads could be damaged to a point where they contact the platter surface and will scratch it. There's really nothing you can do on your own and definitely nothing any software can do.

The reality is, the platters develop crystallization even before the drive is opened. In fact, in the follow up video we just posted, it killed the heads almost immediately. Does the amount of crystallization increase the longer the drive is exposed to ambient air? Absolutely! However, the instant the case cover is removed there was already enough ice on the platters to damage the heads. A drive is not impervious to outside air and humidity which is why ice forms even when it is sealed.

It's hard to say, because they all have their issues. For example, Seagate drives are very susceptible to spindle damage if they are just bumped or knocked over. Western Digital MyBook and Passport drives are usually encrypted, which means you need the bridge controller in order to access the data. If something happens to the controller you can't just pull the drive from the enclosure and read it. Every drive is prone to physical failures though. The key is having a redundant backup.

easy fix for frosting , use a single bag, throw a couple silica dessicant bags in with it

Putting into a bag alone will not stop the already present moisture from condensing. If you were to try this again, you may get better results from leaving in a desiccant for 24 hrs and not opening until its been in the freezer and then warmed back above the dew point. If anything heat may offer some resolution, a freezer makes the least amount of sense.. not unless you are trying to remove power to something to reset the unresetable. I heard something like this back in the 90's when a password for cell phones and secured car stereo decks were locked up.

Of course the platters got frost on them, you opened the case and exposed it to warm air. I did this once and I was able to get data off of the drive, but I didn't open the case when I did it. Also, you only do this as a last resort.

So I put it behind a window where was very cold for a 15 min and HDD, which barely was not displaying even space sizes, I was able to see even files with dates! So it must be something actually. Remember. If some myth born, it must be a background behind, which did lead it to see the light.

Wish I'd known that earlier.. Perhaps I could have just done a platter swap, but now mine is likely trashed. I had never heard of that "old wives' tale", incidentally.. It's only that mine was running so hot that I thought that was making the error rate much worse. Helped for a few minutes only... I have a virtual drive with my XP Serial on it, and no backup of either the nunber or the data, which was many hundreds of hours of fine tuning a visual pinball installation. I'm just not going to go through another half a year of that again.. S, in immortal words of Ricky Ricardo.. ..Don' go freez the hardd driver.. Lucie.. or it'll 'splode' ;-)

2 sealed unusable hd's went into freezer for 45 min. Both were enclosed in 3 ziplock bags w/ as little air in each bag as possible. They were taken 1 at a time out & connected to my iMac. 1 loaded right up like it was straight from the factory. The other did not. 50%... not bad. Here is the real shocker. Non working drive functioned perfectly until a few weeks ago when I accidentally deleted all folders. Working drive was dropped 4 years ago & hasn't worked since. True story. Done on 9/27/13.

I wonder if there's a how to basic about data recovery

No problem. Is that a Seagate hard drive by chance? Only reason I ask is that is a pretty typical symptom with them. It can be firmware related, or sometimes a head (or heads) haven't completely failed, but have just degraded.

Freezing my hard drive did work for me. I avoided the condensation. First I left my hard drive out in the winter cold over night and did not use a plastic bag. I do not see the logic of the plastic bag because there is no humidity when it is below freezing. Then I brought my fully charged computer out into the cold, inserted the cold hard drive, and booted it up. After some time it booted up, did some repairs, and now it is working fine. I will replace the HDD anyway because now I do not trust it. It is obvious that freezing does help because it shrinks the moving parts. Condensation is what ruins the computers.

In our follow up video it killed the heads almost instantly. The reality is, if the heads are bad, the freezer won't fix them. If the firmware is corrupt, the freezer won't fix it. Neither of those problems have anything to do with temperature. We were just illustrating why this could be a potentially bad thing to do. When you see people destroy their data, especially family pictures, by trying something that they have been told is a "safe" and viable method, it's frustrating to say the least.

I managed to recover all the data of a faulty hard drive by putting it in the freezer. This in no way contradicts your video which I appreciate as very good advice. My HDD would start up cold ok but then crash after about 15 minutes. I suspected that the electronics had a component that had developed a thermal fault. Not that uncommon in my experience. I tried freezer spray, but found that by putting the HDD in a plastic bag in the freezer for 20 minutes many times I eventually rescued all the data. The drive was then dumped. I think the short stays in the freezer was only enough to cool the electronics.

My HDD fucked me over! I had data that I will never get back. You think they would come up with a better hard drive by now, after all it is 2014.

Yes...technically you can in some cases, but it is VERY easy to cause even bigger issues with the firmware. You have to be extremely careful. All of the commands in Terminal are case sensitive, so if you do a lower-case where it should be upper, it's an entirely different command.

In this moment, my lacie rugged 3.0 USB is freezing.... youtube please fingercrossed for us!

This will fix the click of death

Some people must ot know what backup data means.If they did hate to say this but truth be.They would not need to pay for professional data recovery.All it takes it backing files up on a usb flash drive thats very important to you.Or could back up an entire hd with acronis or similar.To save in this situation.

I don't believe the dangers are overstated, the risk is simply explained. We talk to people every single week that have tried this because they read about it, and the final result ends up worse than it was initially. With that explanation you can see plainly why it can be risky. I can't stress enough that there is absolutely NOTHING cold temperature can do to repair a failed head, corrupt firmware, or spindle motor damage which are the 3 most common types of failures we see daily.

Damn those bags are noisy :P

I can't really tell whether or not he knows what he is doing.

Use a humidity remover bag and rap it in a plastic bag together with the hdd if you want to recover data using this method. This thing might not work but i was able to recover my data tahanks to freezing (Copied files for 20 min , same thing again , into freezer and out again. Took about a day but the job was done (20 gig of pictures and videos)

Put it in a bag and vacuum ALL the air out

If you put a HDD in the freezer you should not be allowed with in 100 ft of a PC or laptop

You put the drive in a frost-producing freezer. Putting it in a frost-free freezer would seem to cause less ice-crystals to form.

Why is Danny McBride telling me to freeze my hard drive?

Freezing a drive allowed me to recover SOME files from a drive which could not be accessed at all prior. It is not a magical cure as some claim it to be, though. The dangers are overstated in this video. People don't just go throwing a working disk in the freezer for fun...it's done to recover data from a drive that is not accessible and in that case, it is a viable route. However, I would save it for a situation in which it is a last ditch effort and all other methods have been exhausted..

Seagate and Toshiba make lousy drives. Finally I got a Verbatim 1TB with a Sony HDD inside 2 years later good as new

Ok, I can understand that it's bad for HDD mechanical parts but what if you put into a freezer circuit board only? It's easy to unscrew and you aren't compromising insides of HDD. You said that freezing it could potentially fix the issue...

It's a Torx driver.

To be honest, I haven't had a HD failure in my 20 years of computing.

*** Should read: It's NOT the condensation that causes damage to the platter...

To all that say "back it up" well, I did and that failed. So how can i backup my data when the backuips fail?

If this was done for 10mins will this be the same result.

Pretty much par for the course here I'm afraid. I don't know how many more ways we can say this is a bad idea. That "screech" sound you heard was most likely due to the heads having bonded to the platter surface. When the drive was powered on, it shears the head off and drags the assembly on the platter and scores it. Your description did pose a possibility I hadn't thought of, and that is the heads actually freezing to the platter and sticking.

It should be recoverable if there's no platter damage. You can visit our website at acsdata.com for more information about our services.

Then just don't take it out, run it in the freezer!